Key Witness in Bomb-Plot Trial Admits Lying About His Exploits

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

Published: March 8, 1995

The prosecution's most important witness in the terrorism trial of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 10 others admitted yesterday that he had lied for years about his background, boasting to Federal agents and friends that he was an intelligence officer in the Egyptian Army when in reality he had been a technical officer who never saw combat.

As he testified for the first time in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Emad Salem, the 45-year-old informer who received $1 million for his testimony, recounted how he had lied again and again to impress people.

Once, he said, he even lied under oath in a criminal trial in Manhattan, claiming he had been wounded trying to protect President Anwar Sadat of Egypt when he was assassinated in 1981. "I tried to maintain myself to be a big shot," the rotund and balding Mr. Salem said, wriggling his thumbs nervously as he addressed the jurors.

Mr. Salem's testimony was a tactic by the prosecution to deflect what is expected to be a brutal cross-examination from defense lawyers. Throughout the trial, defense lawyers labeled Mr. Salem as an unreliable witness who never stopped working for the Egyptian Government and who was sent to entrap Mr. Abdel Rahman.

"If you are a liar by nature," said Lynne F. Stewart, a lawyer for Mr. Abdel Rahman, "you don't change overnight, even if they write you a check for a million dollars."

Mr. Salem is considered a critical witness because he infiltrated the circle of Islamic men now on trial and secretly recorded hours and hours of conversations with them in May and June 1993. Those tapes, the prosecution says, represent some of the strongest prosecution evidence that there was a conspiracy to wage a "war of urban terrorism" against the United States, led by Mr. Abdel Rahman.

The jury must decide whether Mr. Abdel Rahman and the other defendants are guilty of plotting to bomb the United Nations, the F.B.I. office in New York and two tunnels under the Hudson River. The men on trial, prosecutors say, had ties to the men convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Mr. Abdel Rahman is considered a dangerous political influence by the Egyptian Government, someone who is capable of inciting a revolution by fundamentalist Islamic militants. He has already been tried three times there on terrorist charges but never convicted.

The day's testimony peeled away much of the mystery that has surrounded Mr. Salem. Since being placed in a witness protection program in July 1993, he has been described repeatedly in news articles as a former Egyptian intelligence official.

The woman he married after moving to the United States, Barbara Rogers, said in several interviews with newspapers and television stations that Mr. Salem was an Egyptian double agent. In addition, F.B.I. agents apparently believed some of Mr. Salem's boasts because in 1992 they gave him lie-detector tests aimed at determining his loyalty.

On the stand yesterday, Mr. Salem told of how he moved to New York from Cairo in 1987, giving up a 17-year career in the military and leaving behind two children and an Egyptian wife.

After telling the jury this history, Mr. Salem testified that Mr. Abdel Rahman had urged him to kill Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian President, as they were riding in a van to Detroit in late 1993. Mr. Salem said he had met Mr. Abdel Rahman only a few days earlier and had volunteered to rent a van for the trip, hoping to gain his confidence.

On the long ride, Mr. Abdel Rahman sat by Mr. Salem, questioned him about his military career and suggested that it had been a waste of time. A little later, Mr. Salem recalled, Mr. Abdel Rahman told him to redeem himself by assassinating Mr. Mubarak.

Aside from the Mubarak issue, most of Mr. Salem's testimony yesterday concerned his long career in the Egyptian Army, where he said he rose to the rank of major and was in charge of radar equipment, and the many lies he now says he told when he immigrated to the United States in 1987.

Those lies, he said, started almost immediately after he arrived in New York and married Ms. Rogers, a secretary he met through a cousin. Mr. Salem admitted to Andrew McCarthy, the lead prosecutor, that he had told Ms. Rogers he worked for the military intelligence service in Egypt and had served as one of President Sadat's bodyguards.

"I was trying to impress her," he said. "I told her a lot of bragging stories."

Mr. Salem said he had lied because he had difficulty coming to terms with his new life as an immigrant. He had given up a comfortable existence with a driver and many perquisites for a life of working as a stock boy, driving a taxi and being a security guard in department stores.

"I was like a big shot in Egypt, and all of a sudden I became just an immigrant," he said.

Mr. Salem said he also lied to the F.B.I. agent who recruited him as an informer, Nancy Floyd. He told her, he said, that he worked in Egyptian intelligence and knew Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, President Sadam Hussein of Iraq and King Hussein of Jordan.

After the 1990 assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane in a Manhattan hotel, the F.B.I. tried to recruit Mr. Salem to infiltrate the circle around the accused gunman, El Sayyid A. Nosair. Mr. Salem said he refused until October 1991, when he lost his job as head of security at the Best Western Woodward Hotel in mid-Manhattan.

He was paid $500 a week plus expenses by the Government until July 1993, when the F.B.I. abruptly dismissed him, partly because he failed lie-detector tests, prosecutors have said. The bureau rehired him in March 1993 after the trade center bombing. He is being paid $1,056,200 for his testimony and is in a witness protection program.

Ms. Stewart, the lawyer for Mr. Abdel Rahman, said Mr. Salem's testimony differed in some respects to the account he had given F.B.I. officials in reports in 1991 and 1992.

"He is not going to survive cross-examination because he's changed his facts," Ms. Stewart predicted. "Now he's eating all his lies and now he suddenly gets religion, if you'll excuse the reference."